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Bottle Rockets

Sunday
3/8/2009

As cocktail hour approached on Saturday night, we were jolted out of hibernation by a call from our shelter coordinator. Someone had just brought two bottle-babies to the shelter after finding them wrapped in a towel in her yard (I think). We can’t foster now because we’re heading out to Colorado for a week on Wednesday, but the shelter needed someone to take care of them over the weekend. The alternative was expensive monitoring and care at a 24x7 vet hospital. We agreed to take them until Tuesday; that will give the shelter time to find a longer-term foster home and schedule the veterinary check-up that all fosterlings need.

So these little guys (we think they’re both male), will be rocketing in and out of 50K. We wish we could see them all the way through.

Since no kitten stays unnamed at 50K, we tagged these guys Arnie (orange tabby) and Caddo (black/white). Arnie’s name emerged from musings I had about golf – a game I don’t care about or play – while lying half-asleep in bed this morning.

Caddo is Martha’s much more appropriate name. It’s and anglicization of “cadeaux”. Pourquoi, you ask? Because today is Martha’s birthday!

And she’s spending a warm spring Sunday… you guessed it, in the office. Where she’s spent the majority of her waking hours over the last three weeks, trying to whip a long, convoluted proposal into shape amidst a welter of competing and half-baked plans before we fly out Weds morning. Fun, eh?

So Arnie and Caddo are now providing Martha with a second source of sleep deprivation. I fed them last night at 6pm (Martha was in the office, natch), and then we both fed them at 10pm, 2am, and 7am. I just finished the 11am feeding, and am starting to feel the spaciness I associate with the arrival of the Nanos last May. Like them, Arnie and Caddo are in the warm and windowless 50K nursery, which contributes to that “is it day or night?” mindset we associate with bottle babies.

So far, so good on the health front. They’re taking the bottle reasonably well (especially Arnie, who gets suction; Caddo jaws the nipple), but we’re on guard because their bellies feel a bit distended, and that can imply parasites and diarrhea. We haven’t seen any poop of any kind yet and that’s fine with us, since we’ve learned that constipation is the least worrisome symptom. The scariest is the jet of whitish-yellowish-greenish liquid poop that we saw from previous neonates like Mimi and Pierre and the Nanos. If we see that, we’ll be lobbying for both Metronidazole and Clavamox, tout de suite.

filed by: TS

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